Monica Cannon-Grant Charged With 9 New Counts Of Fraud And Conspiracy, Pocketed Pandemic Funding And Rental Assistance By Lying On Taxes

 

Yesterday the US Attorney’s Office of Massachusetts announced they were adding 9 new charges to the 18 charges of fraud and conspiracy against Monica Cannon-Grant.

I am writing this blog today specifically to alert the Billerica School Committee and superintendent’s office, since they seem to have no idea who this woman is, yet invited her to speak to students at an assembly last month. I wrote them an email alerting them this morning:

If you’d like to do the same you can copy and paste these into your email: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]

I’d hate to see them look incompetent again.

When Monica was paid to speak to students as the guest role model for Black History Month she brought in a picture of a Boston Globe article praising her for her work as an activist.

If she comes in again I think this would be a more appropriate Globe headline:

Dear Billerica School Committee and Administration,

I realize that the tax deadline is fast approaching, and perhaps you were considering to invite Monica in to teach a class on how to properly account for millions of dollars in donated money. I am writing to inform you that this would be ill advised, as Monica’s 9 new charges include issues with filing her taxes in time. You can read all about it here on the official website for the Department of Justice. I assume you are unfamiliar with this organization as well, but they are the federal governmental body in charge of investigating interstate crime. They published a similar announcement last March when Monica was initially charged, and since every single person who runs the Billerica Public Schools did not see it I can only assume you will miss this one as well if I do not quote it:

The former founder and chief executive of the local nonprofit Violence in Boston (VIB) and her husband, also a former founding director of the organization, have been charged in a superseding indictment today charging additional schemes to defraud the City of Boston out of COVID-19 relief funds and rental assistance money.  

Monica Cannon-Grant, 42, and Clark Grant, 39, both of Taunton, have been charged by a federal grand jury in a 27-count superseding indictment, returned today with three counts of wire fraud conspiracy; 17 counts of wire fraud; one count of conspiracy; and one count of making false statements to a mortgage lending business.

The new wire fraud charges center on alleged schemes to obtain and utilize pandemic assistance funds from the Boston Resiliency Fund for purposes not disclosed to the City, including for their own personal benefit, as well as to fraudulently obtain rental assistance payments from Boston’s Office of Housing Stability. Cannon-Grant was also charged with mail fraud, filing false tax returns, and failing to file tax returns. Cannon-Grant and Clark Grant were previously charged in an 18-count indictment in March 2022. The defendants will appear in federal court in Boston at a later date.

According to the superseding indictment, the defendants allegedly conspired to use VIB to defraud the Boston Resiliency Fund, a charitable fund established by the City of Boston to provide aid to Boston residents during the COVID-19 pandemic. After receiving approximately $53,977 in pandemic relief funds, the defendants allegedly withdrew approximately $30,000 in cash from the VIB bank account, some of which the defendants kept. After depositing the COVID-19 relief grant check, the defendants are also alleged to have used VIB funds to pay their auto loan and auto insurance bills.

In addition, the superseding indictment alleges that the defendants conspired to defraud Boston’s Office of Housing Stability by concealing thousands of dollars of household income in order to obtain $12,600 in rental assistance from the City of Boston. Instead of truthfully reporting that Clark Grant was receiving pandemic unemployment assistance (in addition to his salary), and that other family members were gainfully employed and receiving pandemic unemployment (in the case of one other family member), the defendants allegedly misrepresented their actual household income to obtain rent relief funds that were intended to aid Boston residents who were facing housing insecurity.    

It is further alleged that the defendants conspired to defraud the Massachusetts Department of Unemployment Assistance by submitting a forged employment document so that another family member could receive approximately $43,893 in unemployment assistance, bringing the total amount of fraudulent unemployment assistance received by the defendants and their co-conspirators to approximately $145,269. Finally, the superseding indictment alleges that Cannon-Grant filed false tax returns for 2017 and 2018 and that she failed to file tax returns for 2019 and 2020, failing to report tens of thousands of dollars that Cannon-Grant received from VIB and an entity with which she contracted to provide consulting services. 

Those are some big words, so let me break it down for you:

• What happened here is that upon further investigation the US Attorney’s Office discovered that your speaker for Black History Month applied for pandemic giveaway money that was earmarked for people who were in danger of being evicted. The City of Boston decided to giveaway money to help prevent that from happening, and since Monica presents herself as the fairy godmother for the black community in Boston, the City naively trusted her to distribute money to those who needed it. They were once just as stupid as you were. Monica applied for this pandemic money, knowing that she didn’t need it to pay her rent, nor was she going to help pay anyone else’s rent. Instead she pocketed the cash to pay for a new car and insurance. That money could have gone to people who actually needed it, who were disproportionately black and brown, as are most of Monica’s victims. 
• Additionally, Monica and her husband applied for and received $12,600 in rental assistance, despite the fact that they had no issues paying their rent. In order to receive that money they had to present their salary as much lower than it actually was. This is known as “fraud.”
• There is also a third member of Monica’s household who pretended to be unemployed as a result of the pandemic and provide the government with fraudulent documents in order to obtain $43,893 in unemployment. As it turns out they were employed the whole time. I can only assume that this person is her grown son, who also worked for her at VIB and collected an unreported salary. This is the same crime Monica’s husband was already charged with.
• Finally, as we initially reported years ago, Monica never filed her taxes for VIB in 2019 or 2020. She only did so after we exposed her in our award winning 2020 investigative stories. However, when she did file her taxes she made it seem like the organization had taken in less than $100K, when in fact that number was likely in the millions. Monica used that money to obtain a mortgage and buy a house in Taunton.

In my opinion, this whole thing reeks of Rachael Rollins, the US Attorney for Massachusetts who is in charge of prosecuting her former friend.

Rollins showed the world when she threatened to have a Boston 25 News charged for a crime she didn’t commit, that she is not above weaponizing her office to punish people who are critical of her.

Continuing to freak out, she goes full Karen, “who do you think you are”… well they are the press, the ones who hold the powerful accountable. She even threatens to call 911 & file a false report, before launching another racial attack against Ms Lawson… pic.twitter.com/2wUSdveIOy

— Live Boston (@LiveBoston617) January 14, 2021

In October Monica published private communications between her and Rollins, and has accused the former District Attorney of working in concert with white supremacists.

Knowing Rollins, there is a good chance she took this personally. Her office wants Monica to take a plea deal, since a guilty verdict is inevitable. Monica’s failure to do so, and her ongoing smear campaign against influential people in Boston for no longer supporting her, likely has made Rollins more inclined to ensure she gets the maximum punishment. Never thought I’d see the day when I was cheering on Rachael Rollins, but here we are.